Many businesses and organizations employ one or more business applications, and in some cases, suites of business applications, to provide visibility and control over various aspects of the business. Such “business applications” (or, as they are sometimes called, “enterprise applications”) can include, without limitation, customer relationship management (“CRM”) applications, enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) applications, supply chain management applications, and other applications dealing with various finance, accounting, manufacturing, and/or distribution functions, to name but a few examples. Exemplary enterprise application suites include, without limitation, Oracle Fusion, Oracle eBusiness Suite and JD Edwards Enterprise One, all of which are available from Oracle Corporation of Redwood Shores, Calif.
“Objects” correspond to items and/or sets of information that are used to hold information and data that are used by the enterprise applications. For example, in a CRM system, an object may be created and used to track a sales opportunity.
One function that is useful with regards to these objects is to allow users to follow objects in the system. When a user follows an object, a change or update to that object will result in an automatic display of that event to the user (e.g., when the user next logs into the system after the change or update) at a convenient place, such as the “home page”. To explain, consider a CRM opportunity object that is accessed by the members of a given sales team. That opportunity object may be designated to be followed by all the members of that sales team. When one member of the sale team updates that opportunity object in the system, the other members of the sales team that follow the opportunity will be automatically notified of the change to it, and will receive a display on a user interface with that change or update. All changes for all objects the user follows are collected together in their view of an “activity stream”, e.g., having messages and information to be presented to or collected for the user. This permits messages to be seen without explicitly accessing the objects that they relate to.
One approach that can be taken to implement following of objects is to require users to manually select which objects are to be followed. The drawback to this approach is it requires the user to know exactly which objects should be followed, and to then manually make a designation for following the object. If the user fails to either recognize that a particular object should be followed and/or fails to properly engage in the proper command sequence to initiate following, then an object that otherwise should be followed will not, in fact, be followed by the user.
In addition, as users follow more and more objects in the enterprise applications they use, the number of messages appearing on their activity stream increases. At a point in the future the volume of messages will be too great to be useful and as such an effective approach is required for user to automatically stop following objects that are no longer of interest (otherwise known as “unfollow” as provided herein).
Therefore, there is a need for a more effective approach to implement following of objects in an enterprise application system.